Cankut's Blog

Recursive product strategy

Vinny Lingham was co-founder and CEO of Gyft, a mobile gift card wallet backed by my first fund Romulus Capital. Gyft was acquired by First Data.

Following a short stint at First Data during which Vinny immersed himself in the blockchain space, Vinny launched Civic. As Vinny states in this post, Civic’s ultimate goal is “to engage voters by empowering them to entrust their vote to a registered delegation of relevant domain experts versus an individual politician who may or may not have specific expertise in the issue.” Basically, Civic wants to facilitate the creation of a cross between representative and direct democracy where members of society entrust their online votes on specific issues to domain experts whose views they identify with.

However, this vision can’t be reached immediately. It requires a series of steps, including protecting online user identities and data using a decentralized network (likely using the blockchain that Vinny has researched in detail over the last few years), where each step gets Civic closer to the vision.

Vinny shares these steps in what he calls a recursive product strategy. The gist of the idea is that you should work backwards from an end goal and plan intermediate steps which each get you closer to the end goal. As Vinny likes to say, “design recursively, present chronologically”.